the studies of the human knowledge.

Menu

Religious beliefs and Quotations.

Beliefs:
1.As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect —Ralph Waldo Emerson
2.As religious as any man who prays daily and hangs a rabbit’s foot on his windshield —Harry Prince
3.Beautiful women without religion are like flowers without perfume —Heinrich Heine
4.Catholicism’s a little too much like the gold standard: a fixed weight of piety translatable into a fixed exchange rate of grace —Michael M. Thomas
5.The Christian is like the ripening corn; the riper he grows, the more lowly he bends his head —Thomas Guthrie
6.Christianity is like electricity. It cannot enter a person unless it can pass through —Bishop Richard C. Raines
7.The church is a sort of hospital for men’s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospitals for those bodies —Henry David Thoreau
8.A consistently godless world is like a picture without perspective —Franz Werfel
9.Faith … a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible —E. M. Forster
10.Faith is like love: it cannot be forced —Arthur Schopenhauer
11.Faith without works is like a bird without wings —Francis Beaumont
12.Folded into his religion like a razor into its case —Anon
13.God’s like a kid with too many toys to take care of —Sharon Sheehe Stark
14.People are born churchy or unchurchy, just as they are born with a tendency to arteriosclerosis, cancer or consumption —Anatole France
15.In religion, as in friendship, they who profess most are the least sincere —Richard Brinsley Sheridan
16.In religion as in politics it so happens that we have less charity for those who believe half our creed than for those who deny the whole of it —Charles Caleb Colton
17.Living without faith is like driving in a fog —Anon
18.The majority takes the creed [Calvinism] as a horse takes his collar; it slips by his ears, over his neck, he hardly knows how, but he finds himself in harness and jogs along as his fathers and forefathers before him —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
19.A man who writes of himself without speaking of God is like one who identifies himself without giving his address —Ben Hecht
20.Men’s anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady they neither of them care for —Lord Halifax
21.Our faith … runs as fast as feeling to embrace —William Alfred
22.Our faith is too often like the mercury in the weather-glass; it gets up high in fine weather; in rough weather it sinks proportionally low —Anon
23.Piety, like aristocracy, has its nobility —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
24.Prayed like an orphan —Wendell Berry
25.Prayer is a force as real as terrestrial gravity —Alexis Carrel
26.Priestly mannerisms clung to him like the smell of candle-wax and incense —Peter Kemp
27.Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis —Sigmund Freud
28.Religion is like love; it plays the devil with clear thinking —Rose Macaulay
29.Religion is like the breath of heaven; if it goes abroad in the open air, it scatters and dissolves —Jeremy Taylor
30.Religion, like water, may be free, but when they pipe it to you, you’ve got to help pay for the piping. And the piper —Muriel Spark
31.Religious as a lizard on a rock —Anon
32.Religious sense is like an esthetic sense. You’re born with it or you aren’t —P. D. James, New York Times Magazine, October 5, 1986
33.Sects and creeds of religion are like pocket compasses, good enough to point you in the direction, but the nearer the pole you get the worse they work —Josh Billings
In Billings’ phonetic dialect: “Sekts and creeds of religion are like pocket compesses, good enuff tu point you inte the right direction, but the nearer the pole yu git the wuss tha wurk.”

34.She fought off God like an unwelcome suitor —Nancy Evans about Emily Dickinson, “First Editions”/WNYC February 18, 1987
35.Some Christians are like soiled bank notes: while we acknowledge their value we wish them changed —William Lewis
36.Sometimes the curse of God comes like the caress of a woman’s hand, and sometimes His blessing comes like a knife in the flesh —Amos Oz
37.The soul united to God is like a leaf united to the tree —Ignazio Silone
38.They treated their God like a desk clerk with whom they lodged requests and complaints —Helen Hudson
39.Without dogma a religion is like a body without skeleton. It can’t stand —James G. Huneker

Quotations

“There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it” [George Bernard Shaw Plays Unpleasant (preface)]
“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life” [John Updike Self-Consciousness]
“I count religion but a childish toy,”
“And hold there is no sin but ignorance” [Christopher Marlowe The Jew of Malta]
“Religion…is the opium of the people” [Karl Marx Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right]
“The true meaning of religion is thus not morality, but morality touched by emotion” [Matthew Arnold Literature and Dogma]
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” [Albert Einstein Out of My Later Years]
“Any system of religion that has any thing in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system” [Thomas Paine The Age of Reason]
“I am a Millionaire. That is my religion” [George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara]
“I can’t talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes” [George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara]
“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another” [Jonathan Swift Thoughts on Various Subjects]
“I am for religion against religions” [Victor Hugo Les Miserables]
“Time consecrates;”
“And what is grey with age becomes religion” [Friedrich von Schiller Die Piccolomini]
“One religion is as true as another” [Robert Burton Anatomy of Melancholy]
“Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded”
“That all the apostles would have done as they did” [Lord Byron Don Juan]
“The nearer the Church the further from God” [Bishop Lancelot Andrews Of the Nativity]
“To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy” [Dean Inge Idea of Progress]
“Religion’s in the heart, not in the knees” [Douglas Jerrold The Devil’s Ducat]
“Religion is the frozen thought of men out of which they build temples” [Jiddu Krishnamurti]

Religion hampers rational thought and ultimately damages our species. Religion is a drug human beings need to give up; it as being like “the common cold” and humans need to be cured of it… Daniel Dennett